We lost one of our fur babies, The Little made it to the ripe old age of 18.

We then got a new addition to the family, another little black terror named Sabbath. He was only 8weeks old in this picture and already about the size of Little when she was fully grown

I got a new job (still in the beauty industry). Hurricane Irma ran off with our roof so that got replaced. I closed up shop on my business after a year (no one ever tells you working from home means there’s no such thing as time off). Oh and I chopped off all my hair and decided to dye it funky colors… cause when you turn 30 you stop caring what people think

And in between all that I managed to repaint or redo my office, the library, the dining room, and the master bath! So I haven’t really been idol I’ve just neglected posting anything about it. So let’s see if I can get this started back up!!!

After a long absence our cats are always very happy to see us so this weeks post will be featuring a lot of this guy

We just got a new couch for our library he has adopted it as his own. The library is getting a minor makeover with the addition of some decor from our universal trip along with this new couch. I’ll post a bit about that later this year.

But for now I’ve repainted and redecorated our guest bathroom.

First it was a matter of stripping it down to the bare walls. Including taking down the horrible contractors special mirror you tend to find stuck to the walls in bathrooms. You know the kind I mean; no frame, same width as the vanity. They are super uninviting.

As soon as I started edging I got a visit.

I wanted to see how high he would go. All the way was the answer, then he couldn’t figure out how to get down so I had to rescue him.

There was one little spot above the toilet I couldn’t reach even with the ladder. It’s what I get for having 10′ ceilings. Luckily Mr. Smith is a foot taller than I.

On to finishing touches

All the stuff I hauled out had to go right back in.

The Beemer approved our new towels.
And tah dah the bathroom isn’t so boring anymore

As you can see the mirror isn’t hung yet, it’s just propped up. But that’s the advantage to having a husband that’s over 6′ I’ll just make him do it 😛 .

And if your wondering about the title, yes this is our second bathroom redo (much easier than the first) and the second blue one. You can find the first by clicking here.

In order to match it to the rest of the installation I just removed a few of the pictures and used a paper similar to our wall color to give the impression of empty frames and did a couple maps and a couple metal inserts as well.

The hardest part of the whole process was the hanging bit.

Oh there is that barn door I was talking about.

Of course I had help, including help from the cat

But eventually it was done

And not too shabby if I do say so myself, you can see the barn door peeking out again here.

Hopefully Mr. Smith likes it when he finally gets back from his business trip

It’s been exactly 1 month since we moved in and most everything is unpacked and furnished. I spent today hanging some pictures and getting a few things cleaned up So I figured I would give you a bit of a progress report while things were clean lol.

Our massive bookshelves are finally stocked with all of our books… Ok not all, there are a couple smaller shelves in other parts of the house. And the dining room is looking rather smashing as well. It’s just missing a mirror on that far wall, unfortunately I ran out of picture wire.

Now that the china cabinet is in it (which I foolishly didn’t get a picture of) I’m debating whether the dining room “needs” a rug. Personally I think it might just make it busy, plus food stuffs in rugs; it is not fun. What do you guys think?

We’ve also managed to get the daybeds in each office sorted out

Now it’s just a matter of artwork, I think I’ll go with old botanical prints for my office (the green) and we will carry over the map theme we had in the other house for Mr. Smith. Some of the frames are already the right color.

Hmmmmm I sense a honeymoon destination.

The teal is going to have to have a quick repaint.

Not too bad for a month’s work when we started with a pretty darn empty house.

We started on a couple of new projects today. They are going to be in the works for a long time, mostly because we are still working on getting settled into our new house.

One of them is this old mid-century modern dresser that was passed down to me from my great grand mother.

We actually have the set but the dresser is going to be our new entertainment center, believe it or not.

I just removed a couple of the drawers that are a little worse for ware.

See it’s better already,

Used a hole saw to cut a few holes for components in the backer board. Or let Mr. Smith do so, since hole saws terrify me after my father almost lost a finger to one.

And voila

I plan on painting the top, sides, and bottom boards, as well as the vertical support in the middle. Then I’ll refinish the drawer fronts and feet and stain them a darker wood color to match the other furniture in the house. Im still not sure what color I’ll paint the exterior. I might go with the same TARDIS blue the side table is. What do you think?

I’ll save the other project we started on for a later post. It’s going to be quite a doosie in the long run.

I have been rummaging through my craft closet, trying to clean it out and trying to find some new things to try.

When it comes to crafts I tend to impulse buy. This is whether I know what I’m going to do with something or not. So when I came across the mini canvases I got a while ago I figured it was about time I got out of my comfort zone and give it a whirl.

I really had no idea what I was going to paint on them, or for that matter how to do it. I’ve only ever painted on canvas once before and that was in an instructed class.

But you know how people say “my three year old could do that” of any abstract painting they don’t really understand. I figure what’s the worst that could happen

I just started by blending some colors I liked together, then I got this notion that it might be easy to give it some texture with a brick pattern.

I found a little ampersand image and decided I could paint something like that… So I did… Or at least I tried.

Then I realized I don’t have any kind of sealer or glazing medium, I don’t even know if I need such a thing. But I thought I would try this stuff instead. If nothing else it would give it more texture

Or not… it just gave it a gloss.

Two more mini canvases to go. This was the project of “suck it up, get it done, quit worrying about failing” it was rather cathartic in the end.

I saw a saying about a house built with love

I decided I better build my house tentatively, so I sketched it out first.

So I had love and an ampersand, what goes with love?

In this house that’s the only appropriate answer

After I did pretty good with the “house of love” (bow chika bow wow) I was kinda disappointed in my shenanigans (needs more malarkey) maybe I’ll redo it when I get more comfortable with this paint stuff.

Really it turns out the painting part isn’t that hard it’s the inspiration part that bites, I don’t know what to paint or if I do I automatically think I’m completely incapable, so right now it’s baby steps. Oh and any inspiration would be greatly appreciated.

No, I’m not in Chicago (Alas, I’m sure it’s much cooler there) But amidst all the things in my life I completely forgot to blog about a project I did a couple of months back for the office I work at.

This isn’t the first decorating project I’ve had the chance to do for the office and I’m sure it won’t be the last; if you want to see the others you can click here or here.

I work at a financial planning office. It’s pretty awesome but it is lacking a little… Style. Luckily I’ve been given the go ahead to jazz it up a bit. We had a bunch of coasters from various places but no matching sets so I took the liberty of buying a little pack of blanks from the craft store and sanding them nice and smooth.

Then I just doodled a little geometric design. I chose a bull and a bear since we work in stock portfolios (among a myriad of other things), used my scanner to enlarg it to the right size for the coaster then numbered each section to correspond with a paint color. In other words I made myself a paint by numbers, that way I wouldn’t end up with two like colors touching each other due to lack of planning.

Then I taped the photocopied image onto the coaster and traced over the lines with the blunt edge of an exact-o knife

This left an etching of the image in the soft pine wood of the coaster.

After that it was just a matter of painting each section like I had planned out.

I had four coasters in total so to make each one different i flipped the images so the animals were facing opposite directions and also shuffled which numbers corresponded to which colors.

After the paint was dried I then used a walnut stain over top. Stain over paint may sound kind of silly but on a thin coat of paint it still pulls out the grain of the wood and gives the paint a distressed/vintage look.

The final touch is just a quick clear coat to seal everything and protect it from sweating water glasses.